Sunday, 13 October 2013

"I’ll tell you a secret: [the] anger rush is what keeps a lot of people angry…. Some angry people have learned to love and trust anger…. Rage is the old reliable emotion. You can always count on it to get you high."

"Anger is a curious state. It is a moment of certainty, a moment of being beyond doubt. It’s hard to imagine being actively angry about something and at the same time doubting yourself. Anger and doubt are incompatible. That’s the appeal of anger—at least, for some folks, for those of us who crave certainty and have a hunger to be right. Life is uncertain, and the certainty of anger is like existential catnip—it’s intoxicating within its single-minded decisiveness. Anger often tends to be righteous. I’ve pondered a lot about this property of anger. It has fascinated me for long time. Then, I realized that the righteousness of anger is just that: The experience of being right. And being right—for once!—feels really good. Getting to feel right alleviates our own deep doubts about ourselves. A moment of righteous anger is a rebirth of sorts, a renewal of confidence, a restoration of faith in yourself. And that is intoxicating!"

"We could call it “Life in a Bubble”, or just as appropriately, “Life Inside-Out.” Either way, being in a relationship with someone who deals with a personality disorder is likely to be difficult. This also holds true for relationships with family members and friends who struggle with personality disorders.

While there are several types of personality disorders, the ones that get the most attention these days are Borderline and Narcissistic Personality Disorders (closely linked with these are Antisocial, Paranoid, and Histrionic Personality Disorders).

Reality to a pathological borderline or narcissist can be similar to living life in a bubble, or inside out. Rather seeking stability, there is a subconscious pull to create chaos. Therefore, the person surrounds his/herself in a bubble of chaos. All who enter this bubble will most likely experience the chaos (usually the people closest to the person)."

The disturbing case of the bloggers who fake death and disease for attention

"The Internet, it turns out, is a kind of paradise for people feigning illness and other tragedy.

Faking illness — or violence — is nothing new. As early as Roman times, physicians complained about lying patients. And in the 19th century, psychologists began talking about something they called “factitious disorder,” a category of mental illness in which the patient fakes being sick (or fakes that a child/relative is sick) without receiving any obvious benefit, like money or sick leave. Women would claim to have had (and lost) multiple pregnancies. Otherwise healthy people would shave their heads and drop weight and groan about how much they hated chemo.

By 1980, the American Psychiatric Association had recognized factitious disorders as an official condition — a chronic condition, unlikely to be cured, and affecting as many as 1 percent of all hospital admittees.

But in the late ‘90s, researchers began to notice something different about “factitious disorders” that played out online. For starters, the psychiatrist Marc Feldman observed in 1998, Internet identities are malleable already, which makes an illness that much easier to fake. And because there are so many online communities devoted to health, such fakers find victims readily. In other words, the Internet profoundly enables factitious disorders — and it makes them much more difficult to discover and treat.

Feldman gave the phenomenon a new name: “Munchausen by Internet.” And in the almost two decades since he identified it, Feldman said the disorder is only growing."